Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
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The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
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As a general rule, the longer a man's fame is likely to last, the later it will be in coming; for all excellent products require time for their development.
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Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
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...nothing at all rides on the life or death of the individual.
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I believe a person of any fine feeling scarcely ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to a shock, for the reason that it presents a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
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Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.
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Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
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Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
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Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
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If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
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Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.
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Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
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If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
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... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
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He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
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Meistens belehrt uns erst der Verlust über den Wert der Dinge.
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Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.
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Truth is most beautiful undraped.
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Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
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In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.
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Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
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There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.
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There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
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A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.